An advocate of women’s leadership for more than 30 years, Marie Wilson is founder and President of The White House Project, creator of Take Our Daughters to Work ® Day and author of Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World (Viking 2004). In 1998, Wilson founded The White House Project in order to build a richly diverse, genuinely representative democracy. Before she took the helm at The White House Project, Wilson was, for nearly two decades, the President of the Ms. Foundation for Women. She is an honorary “founding mother” of the Ms. Foundation. In honor of her work, the Ms. Foundation has created The Marie C. Wilson Leadership Fund.

Over the last thirty years, Wilson’s accomplishments span becoming the first woman elected to the Des Moines City Council as a member-at-large in 1983, co-authoring the critically acclaimed Mother Daughter Revolution (1993, Bantam Books), and serving as an official government delegate to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China in 1995. Born and raised in Georgia, Wilson has five children and four grandchildren. She resides in New York City.